ADA Compliant Website

Hello,

I found guidelines on how to make a website ADA compliant, but I am clueless on how to estimate a fee to charge for creating an ADA compliant website. Looking for some tips on how to price an ADA compliant site vs non-ADA compliant.

Thanks!

I’m not quite sure that I understand the question. As far as I know, ADA compliance is related to hospitals and hotels who has certain accessibility issues. I don’t know if there are certain rules for websites in US. But probably my lack of knowledge is due to not being American and not living there.

I assume that you want to build accessible websites that do comply with the regulations that a govermental site should follow.

The way to price for this is exactly the same as with anything else. You’re providing added value, an extra that may increase the traffic of the site (and that means more revenue and more possible customers).

ADA in this case would be Section 508 compliance (which shares enough in common with WCAG). I couldn’t tell you how to price such a thing - not being a for hire consultant. A lot depends on how much needs to be gone through to make things compliant and how in depth you are going. Some things may be easy enough (enforce a CMS to require alt with every image, for example), but others will require training (not referring to something only by color (press the red button), contrast, etc.)

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Coding sites with accessibility in mind is a great practice to utilize in general. Unless you have to do an extensive amount of work to make something accessible I would say you charge exactly what you would charge for a normal website. Your client should not have to pay a premium to make their site available to people who use assistive technology.

+1 Agree

AFAIK ADA has more to do with physical establishments eg. wheelchair accessible

As for websites, IMHO this should be your “professional standard”. Unless of course you also offer unprofessional sites

Depends. The original ADA was written before there were any internets. Many lower courts have been ruling that, because the ADA doesn’t specifically mention websites (which, it couldn’t have, in 1990), they are exempt. However the ruling against Target made the claim that Target was the web gateway to their brick and mortar shops, and everyone kinda expects this to just slowly change via court cases over time. Sad that court cases and lawsuits are needed for people to do the right thing here…

more info

+1

I’m amazed by how many people seem to think accessibility is something which can be tacked on at the end, if required, rather than something which should be in-built from the very beginning. And trying to add it in later is a much more difficult approach to get working successfully, IMHO.

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More recent news about the ADA (US only of course) http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2fdca4f1-47f6-4fa6-97c1-95c757e6fb91